Engineering Newswire 31: Superdome fiasco, relay to blame

Today on Engineering Newswire, we're talking to virtual heads, firing sexists in Silicon Valley, investigating a super-sized power outage, and fishing far flung space garbage from the bottom of the ocean. This episode features:

The University of Cambridge has unveiled Zoe, a virtual talking head that is capable of expressing lifelike facial expressions.

Forking repo's and big dongles brought big problems at the PyCon 2013 conference held in Santa Clara last week.

Amazon.com founder, Jeff Bezos, recently recovered (and plans to restore) old F-1 rocket engines that were used in the Apollo missions from the bottom of the Atlantic.

After the red hot fire of Monday morning engineering subsided, Entergy New Orleans hired forensic engineer John Palmer to perform an independent analysis of the February 3 power outage, and we have the full report.

Terradynamics is the science of legged animals and vehicles moving on granular and other complex surfaces. It could allow designers to optimize legged robots operating in complex environments for search-and-rescue missions, space exploration, and who knows what else.

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